The MAXXI, Girls' Day Out, or Day & Night

This blog really has three titles, the MAXXI, Girls' Day Out, and Day & Night. Let me explain. The name of the museum you are about to see is called the MAXXI as in Museo Nationale delle Arte del XXI Secolo or 21st Century National Art Museum. It's called the Girls' Day Out because Alessandra and I were the two girls who had a day out. And finally, this is called Day & Night because this blog consists of my daytime pictures, as well as those night shots taken by Kikka prior to the opening of the museum proper. Alessandra and I were prohibited of taking any pictures of the exhibits, but Kikka, on the other hand, was able to take photos throughout the museum because none of the exhibits had been installed at that point. The architect for the project was Zaha Hadid.




Wherever possible, I've tried to juxtapose one of my pictures with Kikka's.

This skeleton was on exhibit in the outside courtyard. It pretty much looked like any skeleton you might expect to find on Brobdingnag in Gulliver's Travels until you notice the nose is a beak!

Inside the main lobby, the beak idea resurfaces in the painting that hangs along the staircase. I don't get the point. (Yes, the pun is intended.)

Kikka didn't see the red poles on her visit. These are actually light tubes.

I like how the underside of the grand staircase is turned into a light source.

Below is a picture looking up.

Next is a picture that Kikka took. I would have loved to have been on a little tricycle coasting down the ramp!

Another great view of the different layers in the space.

Below is the main entrance.

Directly to the left is the existing building to which the above entry was added. In one exhibit room there happened to be an exhibit called "Artificial and Natural." When I looked out a sliver of a window, the wall to the left had no cornice, while the opposite wall had the traditional Roman cornice you see below. I thought it might have been the intention of the curator to place that particular exhibit in that space, thinking that the traditional cornice represented the artificial and that the plain wall represented the natural. Obviously, I was over-reading both the exhibit and the space. Turns out that I didn't become aware that some of the museum was housed in an older building until I had left the Museum!

Below is a picture of the campanile that belongs to the church where Kikka, her sister, and her father were baptized!

I think that is Riccardo walking below.

Kikka, her mom, and I liked the handrails in the following picture.

Alessandra and I saw an interesting exhibit near here (picture below). There were plywood boxes about the size of old hi-fi speakers that lined the hallway on the far left. On top of each speaker was a cut-out of one of the provinces of Italy. From each box came music from that particular region. The result was a cacaphony.

One of our favorite exhibits consisted of a room where dozens of large, textured leather hides were hung. The floor, white marble, was routed to simulate the texture of the leather. It doesn't sound very pretty, but when we saw the room for the first time we both said, "oh."

I also really liked the Moretti exhibit. Among other things, he designed the Watergate (where my mother and I had lunch the week following the break-in) and the G.I.L. It was a really well done exhibit of his sketches, models, and photos of his completed buildings. Along one wall was a time line that included major architectural works by other architects. I know very little Spanish, but what I do know of it is that their "ll" is considered a letter in the alphabet. So it was a little funny to me that when the designer of the time line cited the work of Frank Lloyd Wright his name was listed as "F. Ll. Wright" and not "F. L. Wright," causing me to wonder if that person was also fluent in Spanish. Behind the Moretti room was another devoted to Hadid's construction drawings. The collection of CDs must have been 3 to 4 inches thick!

I love this view of a sliver of sky.

About the arched windows.... While I don't mind the window above too much, in the main lobby there is a large arched window with similar-sized suggessions of windows etched into the wall. The arched windows may have paid homage to the original wall and seeing how Hadid's integration of the old space into the new was so seamless (in fact, so seamless that I was totally oblivious to it until I left the museum), the existence of these arched windows seem a bit more plausible now than when I first entered the lobby. That said, I did find the arched windows out of place and simply a little "flat" compared with the other elements in the lobby.

My favorite photograph of the museum, however, is the one below where Alessandra is taking a picture. This photo tells you a lot about my friend. First, she has an artistic eye, but more important, she always looks beyond herself toward others. Incidentally, I don't speak much Italian and Alessandra doesn't speak much English. Nevertheless, we seemed to convey our reactions to the exhibits to each other (thanks in large part to Alessandra's patience) with very little difficulty. It was so much fun to share this experience with Alessandra on one day and then to share it again with Kikka and her photographs on the next day.

And here we are, like two college girls, on our girls' day out! What a special memory I will always have of this day! Grazie mille, Alessandra!

P.S. I'm not as good as Catherine at taking shots like this! I need more practice!

P.P.S. I'm Googling architects' websites for inspiration on how to do the coffee bar in my Revit Roma project. I started with Hadid's site, and for her opening page she uses the lobby shot looking up at the staircase without the exhibit or tube lighting, so it looks like Kikka's photo of the same.